


A World Untranscendend

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, An Uttery Mundane World, Demons, Gen, Magic, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-05 15:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6709996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Alcor the Dreambender is born from Bill Cipher's last desperate attempts to preserve his existence. But the Transcendence never occurs. The world remains much the same as it has always been, except for Mabel and Dipper Pines. One having to deal with the fact her brother is now a powerful demon. The other having to come to grips with being a demon, in a world that remains utterly unaware of his kind's actual existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meat Cute

**Author's Note:**

> Strange idea that popped into my head after a discussion of AUs with Thiscat. Basically, what would happen if Dipper still became a demon, but the transcendence never happened. I may or may not expand on this with more ideas. (If you know me well, that usually means I will forget about the idea immediately after I post it.)

Demons did not exist.

It had taken Henry nearly twenty years to finally realize this. There were no malevolent beings working to create evil in the world. There was no devil that needed to be beaten out of him. Hell did not exist, and neither did demons. 

Sure, gnomes exist, and so do unicorns, manotaurs, ghosts, and Sasquatch. You don't live in Gravity Falls for more than a month without either accepting this fact, or getting the hell out of town. Henry had accepted all of Gravity Fall's weirdness with an ease that surprised even him.

But demons had been the one thing he had been sure of. No matter what his parents had told him, they did not exist. 

Except that Mabel's brother most definitely exists, and he is most definitely not human.

There are contacts that can turn your eyes golden and your sclera black. There's probably some kind of costume jewelry that can make it look like you have fangs. Even the wings protruding from Dipper Pine's lower back could probably be faked with a clever application of paint and rubber.

But they are standing in the middle of an open field, and Mabel's brother is floating a foot off the ground. Even then, Henry's eyes keep searching the air about his prospective brother-in-law, looking for the wires or hidden supports that must be there, because the alternative would mean... 

It's then that he suddenly realizes that even though he had believed Mabel when she said her brother was a demon, he had always taken it to be metaphorical. Just Mabel being Mabel, and exaggerating some trait of her brother's in her own weird way. There is no way, he had thought she was being literal. There's was no way she was being literal. Demons did not exist!

Except that Dipper is leaning forward. Giving Henry a clear view of eyes that shine in a way that colored contacts simply do not. Even the wings twitch and flex in a way that no costume can, not matter how realistic it looks.

There's one part of his mind that's screaming at him that Mabel's brother can't be a demon. Another part that quietly asks, if not a demon, what the heck is he instead? And the rest of him which is simultaneously screaming at him to run, run, run and the part which seems convinced that if he stays perfectly still, this danger won't notice him. 

And somewhere, in the very back of his panicking mind, is the tiny whisper that says he needs to do this. That, demon or not, this is still Mabel's brother, and he matters to her. Even if that part of him in nearly drowned out by instinctual panic in the face of a potential predator.

Dipper's mouth opens, and Henry gets a clear view of a full set of fangs that look far to real to be simply be part of an expensive costume. It's at that moment that something in Henry's brain snaps, and he realizes with a sudden rush of horror that he was wrong. 

Demons did exist.


	2. Mabel's Dead Brother

People are understanding when Mabel Pines first declares that her brother is not dead. 

The official story, is that Dipper Pines got lost in the woods around Gravity Falls and has not been seen since, despite an extensive search by the local community and Search and Rescue teams. No body was ever recovered, nor any trace of him found. Mabel certainly wouldn't have been the first, nor the last person to hold out to impossible hope. There was certainly no direct evidence that Dipper was dead. Even if all the odds suggested that was most likely the case.

People stopped understanding when Mabel also declares that her brother was not missing, and that she knew exactly where he was. Other people just couldn't see him. 

Her parents, still grappling with their own grief, figure Mabel will get over it as she comes to grips with her twin being dead. She doesn't. 

She goes to school for four years insisting not only that her brother is alive, but that he is both present and invisible. Her peers and teachers don't exactly react well. Mabel's parents receive several phone calls from concerned teachers who think she might be cutting herself. The other kids at school tease her constantly, and even though Mabel keeps a smiling face through it all, it slowly wears her down. 

That's until a group of drunk kids at a private house party decide that it would be funny to try and summon up Crazy Mabel's dead brother. 

Mockery is abruptly replaced by fear. It's not an improvement in many ways.

California State Police also begin quietly investigating the massacre of a remote cult out in the desert. Investigators discover on the cult's property the intact body of a young girl who had gone missing several days ago, and the mutilated remains of anywhere between ten to fourteen people. Complete with the unmistakable signs that something had been eating them. Explanations prove elusive, and one officer in charge of the case half-jokingly suggests that the cult tried to summon a demon and succeeded.

Mabel, for her, part becomes known to Piedmont police through getting caught breaking into abandoned buildings and one incident where an aspiring thief managed to get a baseball bat to their head, instead of an old lady's purse.

Her parents can handle their daughter being brought home by police on charges of vigilantism. They have a harder time dealing with their daughter apparently interacting with her dead brother, who is now apparently an invisible demon. A dozen different DIY psycho-therapy books prove ineffective, and their one attempt to bring Mabel to a therapist resulted in the man literally throwing her out of his office, before having a mental breakdown himself.

Things come to a head when Mabel is sixteen. A small disagreement over curfews blows up into a raging argument. Mabel's father ends up shouting at her that Dipper is dead, has been dead for four years, and that she needed to come to grips with that and stop pretending he was still alive. Mabel responds by summoning Dipper right there in the kitchen. Which does absolutely nothing to help the situation.

Mark and Anna Pines can handle the weird. Anna herself was much like Mabel when she was younger. But having their dead son reappear as an eldritch demon is just too far beyond the scope of their understanding. If they were twenty years younger, they might have been able to handle having the fundamental rules of their world overturned. But twenty years ago they had been different people, without a career, a house, and children.

Things are said that cannot be taken back, emotions fun high, and at the end of it, Mabel is on a bus to Gravity Falls with a mostly invisible brother who seems to have no place in the world.

Mark and Anna do visit. They meet Henry when him and Mabel get engaged. They meet the triplets after they are born. They even have the triplets down to visit them in Piedmont for a whole summer. But their relationship with their children never does recover. 

In another world, things would have been different.

In another world, time may have healed all wounds and bridged all gaps.

But in another world, many other things may have been different, but some things may have stayed the same.


	3. Family Duties

Never in his life had Henry actually imagined that he'd live in a house with an honest to god demonic shrine in it. Of course, he also didn't imagine that he would marry a woman who was biologically related to an honest to god demon. 

His parents would blow a blood vessel if they ever found out. Not that Henry had any intention of even hinting such a thing where it was possible it might filter back to his parents.

The shrine itself basically consisted of an end table, a small bowl which served as the alter, a framed portrait of Dipper from when he was twelve, and a pair of wax candles. It didn't exactly look like a demonic shrine. A fact that was frequently used to mislead people who were not in the know. Just say that the set up was a shrine to Mabel's brother, and let most normal folks assume that it was a memorial shrine to a long lost sibling who was still missed.

Of course, to call Mabel a demon worshiper was technically untrue. The idea that she would worship her brother, no matter how transcended, was so ludicrous it made both of them laugh. But she did leave sacrifices, most of them consisting of bags of bulk candy, bought at a discount at the end of Halloween and Summerween. Dipper was also invited to every meal with great formality, as if the food he would be eating were some kind of ceremonial offering.

Dipper gained power from these offerings, Mabel had explained to Henry. Candy and food didn't actually give him all that much power, but it was a lot easier and cheaper to provide than a living animal sacrifice every week. He could also get power through people summoning him and making deals with him, Mabel had also explained. The problem was, there were so few people who even had a sneaking suspicion that demons were real, that Dipper rarely was summoned by anyone out of the family. 

"Most people aren't even seriously expecting to get a real demon," Dipper had explained with a sharp-toothed grin. "I was once summoned by a theater troupe who were acting out a summoning scene for a play during a dress rehearsal. Oh the look on their faces..."

Of course, having a real demonic shrine in the house, and a real demon for a member of the family occasionally caused problems. Henry and Mabel had both gotten some weird calls from the local school board, after the Triplets had told their kindergarten class that they sacrificed a chicken to Uncle Dipper every Christmas. Nevermind the rare occasions when Dipper would return from a summoning silent and solemn. Even weirder were the notes they would get from the local dentist and the public health nurse, warning of the dangers of too much sugar and hinting that their family should maybe cut down on the amount of candy they bought weekly. Henry's old Sunday school teacher would probably have had a stroke if ever learned what Henry and his family did on Sunday instead of going to church. 

Nevertheless, Mabel continued sacrificing candy by the bagful, regardless as to how much their sweets bill went up. She continued to invite Dipper to every meal with ritual and ceremony that a times got tedious. She even went to the trouble of bringing home a live animal sacrifice every holiday, regardless of the mess, expense, and strange looks it garnered. 

"He's my brother," Mabel had explained to Henry once. "He needs these sacrifices to keep up his power and stay on this plane. If I don't do them, who will?"


End file.
